Joffrey Dancers Artist Talk with Brendan Fernandes and Madison Mainwaring

Join us for a roundtable on the inner workings of ballet at the professional level with Joffrey dancers, Initiative on Race and Resilience artist-in-residence Brendan Fernandes, and Assistant Professor of French, Madison Mainwaring. Tickets are not required for the pre-talk. 

Madison Mainwaring is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on feminism, performance and the archive in France and North Africa from the nineteenth century to the present day. In her current project, she interrogates the archetype of the ballerina as muse to the male writer/artist, asking how we can reclaim the silences of dance to find women’s perspectives that have been written out of the historical record. She has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship for her criticism, which has been published in The New York Times and other outlets. 

Brendan Fernandes  (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is a Canadian artist based in Chicago working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. His practice explores race, queer culture, protest, and collective movement through hybrid forms; part ballet, part political action, part queer celebration. A graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Fernandes has received awards from Arts Alliance Illinois, Artadia, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Smithsonian. His work has been presented at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, MoMA, the Guggenheim, Getty Museum, MCA Chicago, and the National Gallery of Canada. He is Associate Professor at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago) and Susan Inglett Gallery (New York). Recent projects include exhibitions at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Prospect.6. A major solo exhibition debuts at the Driehaus Museum in 2025.

Originally published at raceandresilience.nd.edu.